Emily Clark is the Clement Chambers Benenson Professor in American Colonial History. She specializes in early American and Atlantic world history. Her research interests include race, gender, religion and historical memory.

Research InterestsEarly America and the Atlantic World, particularly the Francophone Atlantic. I am especially interested in the ways that the history of places like Louisiana and the French Antilles can illuminate the development of racial, ethnic, and national identities in other parts of colonial and early national America. My most recent book, published in 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, historicizes the figures of the quadroon and the "tragic mulatta," their links with Haiti and New Orleans, and the role they have played in shaping national American memory and identity.

Teaching InterestsEarly North America (1492-1800), Atlantic World (1450-1888), Revolutionary America and Caribbean (1776-1804), Louisiana and New Orleans, religion, gender, and the history of race and race relations. Also, archival skills and paleography and the development of web-based student projects. I am especially interested in working with students who wish to make use of the rich colonial and early national manuscript records housed in New Orleans archives and am a collaborator on Tulane's Media NOLA project, medianola.org.

Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727-1760Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007
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“Refracted Reformations and the Making of Republicans”Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 180-203.

"How American Is New Orleans? What the Founding Era Has to Tell Us"In Samuel C. Ramer and Blair A. Ruble, Place, Identity, and Urban Culture: Odesa and New Orleans, Kennen Institute Occasional Paper #31 (Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008).

"Hail Mary Down by the Riverside: Black and White Catholic Women in Early America"In Catherine A. Brekus, The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 91-107.

Distinguished Book Award of the History of Women Religious Conference (2010)Awarded June 2010 to Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834

Julia Cherry Spruill Prize of the Southern Association for Women Historians (2008)Awarded to Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834

Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History (2008)Given by the Louisiana Historical Association and the Historic New Orleans Foundation to Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834

Saint-Louis, Senegal/New Orleans ConferenceNew Orleans, Louisiana April 22-25, 2013 was the site of the second part of an international conference, "Saint-Louis, Senegal, and New Orleans:The Comparative and Linked History of Two Port Cities on Each Side of the Atlantic from the 17th to the 19th Centuries," cosponsored by Tulane, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, in exclusive partnership with RFI (Radio France Internationale). Emily Clark, Clement Chambers Benenson Professor of American Colonial History and associate professor of history, is the conference organizer for Tulane.

Saint-Louis, Senegal/New Orleans ConferenceNew Orleans, Louisiana April 22-25, 2013 was the site of the second part of an international conference, "Saint-Louis, Senegal, and New Orleans:The Comparative and Linked History of Two Port Cities on Each Side of the Atlantic from the 17th to the 19th Centuries," cosponsored by Tulane, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, in exclusive partnership with RFI (Radio France Internationale). Emily Clark, Clement Chambers Benenson Professor of American Colonial History and associate professor of history, is the conference organizer for Tulane.

Dianne Woest Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities, Historic New Orleans Collection (2010)

Distinguished Book Award of the History of Women Religious Conference (2010)
Awarded June 2010 to Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834

On leave spring semester 2011

2011 ATLAS Grant
A grant from the Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars of the Louisiana State Board of Regents supported a year's research leave to complete the manuscript of Strange History of the American Quadroon.

History Detectives
August 30 at 8 pm CDT, Professor Clark will appear as one of the on-screen historians on the PBS program, “The History Detectives,” in a segment about a free woman of color in colonial New Orleans.
http://tulane.edu/ne...